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??? This is obviously true. The bandwidth available in a geographic location is, practically speaking, limited. Roads are cheap to pave, but if there was con

??? This is obviously true. The bandwidth available in a geographic location is, practically speaking, limited. Roads are cheap to pave, but if there was congestion 24/7 and you paved all you could, then you would need to start rationing road usage. For a business the best way to ration is to charge more. Solving this problem requires a massive amount of engineering work, which would also justify the increased cost.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
And you're not physically limited by how many machines you can put in a data center?
weird-eye-issue 3y ago
How does Cloudflare offer it for free?
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Um. It’s not. They have a free plan, but it’s subsidized by their paying customers.
  - Syonyk 3y ago
    And a lot of their "good" features are only available to paying customers. Image resizing, Argo (fancy... routing aware something or another to your server), more than a few cache rules, and a range of other custom stuff. I think they do a really good job of it, personally. It's trivial to get your free account set up to play with and even host a pretty serious amount of "simple" traffic, and you can easily explore the features, see what's available for paid (they're quite transparent about the assorted costs which is nice), etc. It feels a bit like an honest version of Microsoft and Adobe's "look the other way for casual piracy, because you're familiar with the product..." of the late 90s and early 2000s. "Hey, try it out for free, and if the free stuff works for you, great. But if you need more, this is what else we offer!"
  - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    I'm not saying Cloudflare is free I'm saying they don't charge bandwidth
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      They are eating the costs, as a marketing ploy. It won’t be free forever. They’ve said as much in their press releases. Basically, they are trying to pressure AWS and friends to lower their egress fees. Once they’re lowered, they’ll start charging for it.
      - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
        Source? I'm incredibly skeptical that one day they will suddenly make a 180 and start charging for bandwidth
        withinboredom 3y ago
        I'd literally have to find the press releases from the day they announced R2, which kinda goes into depth on it a bit (and I can't find it). But logically, why wouldn't they do a 180? It has to be eating into their margins. Wholesale costs alone would estimate that it's eating 15-20% of their revenue. Remember when Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi? It's the same issue, different market; there is so much being subsidized by other money that if they ever run into any financial issues, hire the wrong executive, or simply get market dominance ... they'll shift this all to the customer.
        weird-eye-issue 3y ago
        It's not going to happen and you're talking out your ass. Speculation is fine but let's not pretend like you have any source for your pet theories By the way I say all of this as a Cloudflare Enterprise customer. I imagine you have a tiny fraction of the experience I do with Cloudflare and completely fail to understand the ramifications of what such a decision would entail on their business
toast0 3y ago
Bandwidth in a geographic location is certainly limited... there's only so many fiber strands available, and fiber transceivers only go up to a certain speed, +/- wave division; there's costs of transceivers and what not. But in most places where you'll find datacenters, the limit is rather high. It's also usually possible to run more fiber. If you take a look at the Seattle Internet Exchange [1] which is pretty public about their operations, they've got a router with 2x 36-port 400gbe line cards; three member facing 400gbe connections, 163 member facing 100gbe connections. That's a huge amount of bandwidth available at the exchange, some (perhaps much) of which is then delivered by the member to fiber that goes elsewhere. And SIX isn't the only peering location in the Seattle metro. SIX's traffic graph shows a peak of 2.8 Tbps; AMS-IX's graph shows a peak of 11.7 Tbps, AMS-IX doesn't offer 400 gbe though, but needing more than 100 gbps in one location is pretty rare. [1] https://www.seattleix.net/ https://www.seattleix.net/
- sroussey 3y ago
  There is so much dark fiber out there. Bothering to activate it is a different story.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  There is a difference between being able to run more fiber, and being able to do it cheaply. The more you scale, the more you need everything you depend on to scale. For many places that calculation makes it not worth it.
candiodari 3y ago
Because of advancements in xWDM it is not limited. By replacing networking equipment (0.000001% of total cost) you can x10, x100, and more the bandwidth on an existing cable. The same (single mode) optical cable that was once capable of running 2mbps is now able to run 400 * 100Gbit. Now wireless is starting to repeat this evolution. This is one of the reasons for the old joke: "Do you know how to amass a small fortune in Telecom?" "Start with a big fortune"
stefan_ 3y ago
Bandwidth pricing works the same as product pricing, you are falling for the classic engineer trap in thinking the sum of the parts somehow determines the price. Cloud bandwidth prices are many many magnitudes more than what it "costs" to transfer.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

And you're not physically limited by how many machines you can put in a data center?

weird-eye-issue 3y ago

How does Cloudflare offer it for free?

withinboredom 3y ago
Um. It’s not. They have a free plan, but it’s subsidized by their paying customers.
- Syonyk 3y ago
  And a lot of their "good" features are only available to paying customers. Image resizing, Argo (fancy... routing aware something or another to your server), more than a few cache rules, and a range of other custom stuff. I think they do a really good job of it, personally. It's trivial to get your free account set up to play with and even host a pretty serious amount of "simple" traffic, and you can easily explore the features, see what's available for paid (they're quite transparent about the assorted costs which is nice), etc. It feels a bit like an honest version of Microsoft and Adobe's "look the other way for casual piracy, because you're familiar with the product..." of the late 90s and early 2000s. "Hey, try it out for free, and if the free stuff works for you, great. But if you need more, this is what else we offer!"
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago
  I'm not saying Cloudflare is free I'm saying they don't charge bandwidth
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    They are eating the costs, as a marketing ploy. It won’t be free forever. They’ve said as much in their press releases. Basically, they are trying to pressure AWS and friends to lower their egress fees. Once they’re lowered, they’ll start charging for it.
    - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
      Source? I'm incredibly skeptical that one day they will suddenly make a 180 and start charging for bandwidth
      - withinboredom 3y ago
        I'd literally have to find the press releases from the day they announced R2, which kinda goes into depth on it a bit (and I can't find it). But logically, why wouldn't they do a 180? It has to be eating into their margins. Wholesale costs alone would estimate that it's eating 15-20% of their revenue. Remember when Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi? It's the same issue, different market; there is so much being subsidized by other money that if they ever run into any financial issues, hire the wrong executive, or simply get market dominance ... they'll shift this all to the customer.
        weird-eye-issue 3y ago
        It's not going to happen and you're talking out your ass. Speculation is fine but let's not pretend like you have any source for your pet theories By the way I say all of this as a Cloudflare Enterprise customer. I imagine you have a tiny fraction of the experience I do with Cloudflare and completely fail to understand the ramifications of what such a decision would entail on their business

toast0 3y ago

Bandwidth in a geographic location is certainly limited... there's only so many fiber strands available, and fiber transceivers only go up to a certain speed, +/- wave division; there's costs of transceivers and what not. But in most places where you'll find datacenters, the limit is rather high. It's also usually possible to run more fiber. If you take a look at the Seattle Internet Exchange [1] which is pretty public about their operations, they've got a router with 2x 36-port 400gbe line cards; three member facing 400gbe connections, 163 member facing 100gbe connections. That's a huge amount of bandwidth available at the exchange, some (perhaps much) of which is then delivered by the member to fiber that goes elsewhere. And SIX isn't the only peering location in the Seattle metro. SIX's traffic graph shows a peak of 2.8 Tbps; AMS-IX's graph shows a peak of 11.7 Tbps, AMS-IX doesn't offer 400 gbe though, but needing more than 100 gbps in one location is pretty rare. [1] https://www.seattleix.net/ https://www.seattleix.net/

sroussey 3y ago
There is so much dark fiber out there. Bothering to activate it is a different story.
zeroCalories 3y ago
There is a difference between being able to run more fiber, and being able to do it cheaply. The more you scale, the more you need everything you depend on to scale. For many places that calculation makes it not worth it.

candiodari 3y ago

Because of advancements in xWDM it is not limited. By replacing networking equipment (0.000001% of total cost) you can x10, x100, and more the bandwidth on an existing cable. The same (single mode) optical cable that was once capable of running 2mbps is now able to run 400 * 100Gbit. Now wireless is starting to repeat this evolution. This is one of the reasons for the old joke: "Do you know how to amass a small fortune in Telecom?" "Start with a big fortune"

stefan_ 3y ago

Bandwidth pricing works the same as product pricing, you are falling for the classic engineer trap in thinking the sum of the parts somehow determines the price. Cloud bandwidth prices are many many magnitudes more than what it "costs" to transfer.